Tattoo artist is a career that is growing in popularity and demand. The best tattoo artists are able to use creativity, artistry, and technical skill to create tattoos that reflect their clients’ personalities. If you want to become a tattoo artist, here are a few tips to help you get started.
Start With Tattooing Your Body
The best way to learn how to tattoo is by practicing on yourself! This way you’ll be able to work out any kinks before offering your services to others. It can also be helpful if you have a friend who will try out your designs so that you can get feedback from them as well.
Find A Mentor
If possible, find an experienced tattoo artist who will be willing to mentor you while you’re learning the ropes of being a professional tattoo artist. You’ll need someone who can teach you about the different styles and techniques used in creating tattoos so that when it comes time for customers who want something specific done on their body, they’ll feel confident enough about their decision because they understand what goes into it beforehand instead of just trusting whatever happens with blind faith (which isn’t always an option when dealing with someone else’s body).
How To Become A Tattoo Artist
1. Many tattoo artists were formerly art students.
It’s common to get your start in other mediums before moving to a human canvas. “I always knew that I would be an artist. I didn’t know that I would be tattooing, specifically, but I’ve always wanted to make my living by making art,” Love says. It’s def a hustle though. She received a bachelor’s degree in painting and needed a way to make a steady living through art, so she took a leap and moved to San Diego, California, with her painting portfolio. “I went I went door to door until I found a Polynesian tribal tattoo shop that gave me an apprenticeship,” says Love. And the rest was history.
2. But being good at drawing doesn’t mean you’ll be good at tattooing.
You can think about it like the difference between drawing something on paper and carving a pumpkin, explains Nead. It definitely helps to have a natural aptitude for drawing, but it takes a long time to understand the difference between what you can draw and what you can tattoo. Like anything, your tattoo drawings will improve over time—it’s critical to start out with simple designs.
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3. Going to school is not a must.
“You do not need any specific education to be a tattoo artist, which is part of what I love about the tattoo world: We all come from very different backgrounds,” explains Martinez. You definitely do need to be trained, though, in sanitation, sterilization, blood-borne pathogens, and how to avoid damaging the skin while you work.
Martinez knows some people who have created tattoo schools, which do cost tuition, but “those schools are not really well-viewed in tattoo communities, so if you want to learn with someone, I recommend being patient and finding a tattoo shop and a mentor.” If you really want to understand what it’s like to be a tattoo artist, Martinez advises, “There is no better school than being in an actual tattoo shop, around tattooers and clients.”
4. Save money before you start, because you might have to work for free for a period of time.
Nobody’s great at tattooing until they practice, but the thing is—you can’t get practice without tattooing flesh. Some people practice on grapefruits, but a grapefruit can’t really compare to a nervous, sweating, breathing, vulnerable human being. Most artists start out as apprentices, which is basically like unpaid training. At Nead’s shop, they tattooed for free for the first year, just doing very simple designs. (She says you’d be surprised by how many clients you can get when you’re offering services for free.) Even a year or two after Nead started, she was still tattooing at a heavily discounted rate, simply because she wasn’t as fast or as skilled as other artists.
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“My apprenticeship was ‘free’ money-wise, since I was helping at the shop (welcoming clients, cleaning floors and bathroom, setting up stations, etc.) as a compensation to my mentor for teaching me,” says Martinez. But she still had to pay the bills, so she worked at a bar on the side. “I was working all the time! Between the shop, the bar, and drawing at night, I had to give up all my free time. But it was so worth it! I loved the idea that someday I could become a tattoo artist, that it kept me motivated. I would do it all over again if I had to.”
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5. Prepare for a huge up-front investment in equipment.
Nead recommends getting at least two tattoo machines, a starter ink set, and tubes (which hold the needles in the tattoo machines) plus some disposable supplies, including needles, gloves, rubber bands, Thermofax paper, and skin pens. All in, it can cost upward of $4,000 in equipment to get started. In states where tattoo schools are regulated—like Oregon, where Nead lives—apprenticeships cost somewhere around $10,000 on top of state licensure fees.
6. There’s no guarantee that you’ll ever make a ton of money.
Even after you start making money from your tattoos, the compensation isn’t all that flush—and you still have to pay for the supplies on your own. Basically, if you want to be a tattoo artist, don’t do it for the money.
Of course, salaries do range from one artist to another. “It requires a lot of hard work and consistency to build a unique style, your own voice, and mostly to make high-quality tattoos that don’t just look good at the moment of creation but also heal well with time,” says Martinez. Once you build a robust roster of clients, you can get paid well, but the work never stops. “When a tattooer is not working, they have to constantly find new inspirations, variety in their designs, post nice photos, and work on their portfolios, answer emails—or be sure someone who understands tattooing can do that for you,” according to Martinez. “We never really get to fully step away.”
7. You’ll want to plan every design as much as you can.
Every tattoo starts with a consultation, which is a chance for the client and artist to collaborate on the design—and Love says that aligning on this part is key to make sure she’ll accept the project in the first place. Most of the time, when working on realism, there’s some kind of reference image she’s working from. “But when I’m working on Polynesian tribal [tattoos], there is a lot of drawing in the moment to work with the curves, flow, and contours of the body. I can do both, but my perfectionism and type-A personality prefer a solid game plan,” says Love.
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8. Your artistic medium is a living, breathing thing that changes.
Remember: Skin wrinkles and stretches and sometimes gets sunburns and scars. When you paint on a canvas, you can preserve the way that painting looks for hundreds of years. But tattoos look drastically different even two weeks after the ink has settled in and your skin has healed. Sometimes, Nead warns, people don’t take care of their tattoos and they get ruined, which feels a bit like someone buying your painting and then leaving it out in the rain. Even if you’re clear about the aftercare—no sun exposure for three weeks, only use hypoallergenic products, etc.—sometimes things go wrong, and that’s just part of working with human skin.
9. It’s absolutely possible to tattoo on all skin tones—it just takes skill.
Love wants to make it clear that people of all skin tones should be able to get tattoos, and artists should make it a priority when they’re learning these skills to be able to accommodate all clients. “One of the biggest misconceptions is that darker-skinned people can’t get fine-art tattoos or detailed tattoo work,” Love says. It’s more about using contrast and being able to use solid black along with white highlights that can work on any skin tone, explains Love. “I believe that a truly skilled artist can create a beautiful work of art on any color canvas.”
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10. You might be working on one person’s tattoo for a full day or even multiple days.
Remember what we said about mental focus?? Well, this is where it comes into play the most. So Love, for example, works mostly on large tattoo projects. “On average, I tattoo one client for about 6 hours a day,” she says. (And the client also has to be able to sit still that long, just saying.) Other times, projects will take multiple-long-hour sessions. “The biggest benefit of working in sessions is being able to revisit a past work of art with an improved skillset,” Love adds.
